10 Tips for Capturing and Editing Your Holiday Photos to Perfection

CyberLink Helps Consumers Create Professional Quality Holiday Photos That Will Dazzle Friends and Family

Taipei, Taiwan — As consumers across the world prepare to take billions of photos to capture their personal holiday season memories, CyberLink, a provider of innovative media creation solutions, today unveiled the “Top 10 Ways To Capture and Edit Your Holiday Photos to Perfection.” Based on frequently asked questions and tutorials from the company’s three million member DirectorZone social community, the company has summarized easy and effective ways for consumers to make their personal photos look more professional without having to pay hundreds of dollars. The company’s popular PhotoDirector software is used by millions of consumers, worldwide.

Tip 1: Make Your Friends and Family Look Their “Holiday” Best
They say camera doesn’t lie. However, it is still nice to be able to show our best side in photos. The good news is that modern image editing software now includes easy-to-use tools for stunning digital makeovers. With portraits and group shots, editing software can help brighten a smile, smooth skin or shed a few pounds.

Tip 2: Send Them Home with a Terrific Picture
Holiday entertaining is a big part of the season and it’s always nice to reward your guests with memorable photos of your time together. Be sure to take plenty of shots when your friends are over and spend a few moments fixing up the best ones after the visit. Photos make a great party favor.

Tip 3: Upgrade your Camera’s Lens - with Software
Lens correction helps make up for flaws found in nearly every photo. Imperfections include vignettes or dark areas near the corners of the frame, straight lines appearing curved and color fringes around edge detail as a result of chromatic distortion. Even though these problems don’t always jump out of the original photo, you can almost always see the difference when the corrections are made.

Tip 4: Share the Year’s Highlights in a Slideshow
Slideshows are a wonderful way to share with friends during the holiday season. With the popularity of Smartphones and tablets, you can take slideshows along with you anywhere. Adding pan-and-zoom and music to slideshows makes them feel more dynamic. It’s fun to create a soundtrack to your photos from something on your current playlist. Include a title slide at the beginning of the slideshow to let everybody know the people or event that you are sharing.

Tip 5: Don’t Delete that Photo
There’s often a way to make a poor shot better. Almost every photo captures some special moment or memory, even the worst of your shots. Today’s software is easy to use and great for fixing basic photo problems like lighting and color balance. Plus, removing unwanted elements and fixing up portraits is well within reach. Many modern image editors are also non-destructive so you don’t need to worry about ruining your original photos.

Tip 6: Get Creative
Every once and in a while, it’s great to spend some time exploring the creative side of image editing. Take ordinary photos and turn them into eye catching works of art with filters, special effects, compositing tools, frames, titles and bling highlights - to name a few. Whether your artistic eye tends toward Andy Warhol-style pop art, HDR wizardry or beyond, give yourself the chance to try something new and have some fun. After you’ve created your masterpiece, show it to the world.

Tip 7: Banish Unseasonal Images From Photos
Sometimes you wind up with things in your photos that you just don’t want there: power lines, objects or even people you’d rather not see. Fortunately, there are simple and easy ways to remove unwanted objects from photos – which can now be found in a number of consumer editing packages. You’ll be amazed what you can do in less than five minutes. When removing objects from the foreground, be mindful of the background to ensure that you don’t stretch anything out of place.

Tip 8: Perfect Color Tones
Achieve the right color balance for indoor and outdoor scenes. If you are shooting indoors and there’s enough light, try turning the flash off to get more natural lighting and color. Shoot near the windows to take advantage of available natural light. For outdoor scenes, it is best to stand with the sun at your back so that your subject is facing the source of light. Correct color casts after you shoot by adjusting the White Balance in your editing software.

Tip 9: Manage all Your Photos
When taking pictures of people, it can be tough to get that one ideal pose. Snap away and review the pictures afterwards on your Mac or PC to find just the right shot when everyone is in the best spirits – and have their eyes open. When you bring your photos into your computer, use tagging, face recognition, rating and custom albums to sort and organize your pictures. Techniques for comparing photos such as side-by-side display make it easy to view different shots to find the best one.

Tip 10: Crop for Success
When taking holiday photos, try using the Rule of Thirds to position your subjects. Imagine two horizontal lines and two vertical lines dividing the frame into nine equal parts and place your subject at any of the intersections. Using your photo editing software, try cropping your photos based on other compositional guidelines such as diagonal, isosceles or triangle.

“According to National Geographic, there were approximately 3.5 trillion photos taken last year. The sophistication of today’s consumer digital cameras is creating an expectation for higher quality, professional-looking photos,” said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. “Our Top 10 list was compiled based on the common questions and challenges we see among the more than two million consumers using our DirectorZone social community. The combination of these tips and intuitive photo editing software provides consumers with an exciting and effective way to make their holiday photos dazzle without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars.”

About CyberLink
Founded in 1996, CyberLink Corp. is the world’s leading multimedia software company. With over 100 patented technologies that provide a solid foundation on which to continuously revolutionize the way multimedia is experienced, CyberLink’s visionary outlook has allowed the company to grow rapidly. This ultimately led to a record-breaking IPO on the Taiwan Over-the-Counter Exchange (OTC: 5203) in 2000. CyberLink is currently listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: 5203.TW).

CyberLink’s broad portfolio of multimedia applications can be categorized into two main areas: Media Entertainment – PowerDVD being the flagship product in this category, provides the latest in media playback on PCs, across devices in the home network, and on-the-go with portable smart devices; and Media Creation – offers a series of software to create enticing videos & photos, author Blu-ray & DVD discs and more. CyberLink has built strategic partnerships with leading CPU and GPU providers and a solid reputation for delivering high-quality, interoperable, and fast time-to-market solutions that keep our OEM partners from top PC brands on the leading edge. CyberLink’s worldwide headquarters are located in Taipei, Taiwan, with regional operations offices in North America, Japan, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company has 700 employees worldwide, with more than 500 engineers in product design and development.